In a small town in India, this startup has made millions

Udupi, India. Photo credit: Wikimedia.

In Udupi, where the biggest attraction is a temple and the nearest airport is over an hour’s drive away, Robosoft’s massive, circular tower is the tallest building for miles. Its founder, Rohith Bhat, is also a bit of an anomaly. He’s not your typical small town guy trying to escape the confines of a static environment – in fact, he’s married and settled down there, with a daughter and 450 employees milling around a few miles away from his home.

When investors (and there are plenty interested in Rohith’s app development company) ask him about his choice of location, he responds with a question: “Didn’t Sony start in a small Japanese village?”

I met him at his office where he showed me the latest version of Boom, an app that enhances phone audio. Now, it can turn regular noise into 3D surround sound. He plugs a pair of headphones into the jack, turns on an Evanescence song, and toggles a button on the Boom app.

“This is where we think music is going next,” he mouths to me over the music. “We hide all the hard work, keep it simple, and just give people that one switch to transform their music.”

Simplicity seems to be 20-year-old Robosoft’s motto. The company’s done it all, from helping other firms adjust to Apple’s software demands in 2000 to getting hundreds of apps onto app stores, and even developing an app specifically for zoom and flash when consumers complained that those features weren’t available on the original iPhone.

“We’re a software company that does pure magic,” Rohith states simply.

Go-to guys

Rohith Bhat, founder of Robosoft

The pain point is the central nerve that powers the ever-changing tech world – there’s always something better or newer a customer wants that a service can’t fully offer.

Rohith started out on one end of that nerve in 1996, when Apple officially decided to launch its products in India. It had hired 16 different marketing people to sell its technology – but not a single technical person. Rohith had been working with its software in Japan for a few years, so his return to India placed him among the experts in the country.

“I solved that problem for them by touring around India with their team here,” Rohith says. Robosoft’s first official product was an Indian language keyboard it created for Apple. “Their initial strategy was to have a Hindi and a Gujurati keyboard,” he reminisces. “We rolled one out for them.”

For whatever reason – maybe the keyboard strategy – Apple decided to leave the country within the year. “Steve Jobs said ‘we need to consolidate, let’s win in smaller markets’, and that’s what they did,” says Rohith. For most, this signaled the end of Apple’s time in Asia and companies shut down their internal Apple development teams – but Rohith had a feeling that it wasn’t the end.

“We waited for a while, and were just working with people in Singapore and other places where they had a few customers, and all of a sudden Apple released its new OS,” he says. “Every hardware company thought Apple would have been dead by that point, so they’d all shut down their internal Mac development teams. As Apple pressured them to support its new system, it started referring them to us.”

Focus on yourself

Family man